Fortunately for the peace of the nation, no dairy products were hurled

Nothing to see here, nothing to worry about. Move along, move along.

Really, no problem at all. It’s just a few armed neo-Nazis crashing into a Pride parade.

In Detroit, an armed white supremacist group called the National Socialist Movement (NSM) descended on the annual Motor City Pride Festival, where they held placards, gave Nazi salutes and displayed armbands with swastikas.

Photos from the event, which was attended by thousands of LGBT+ supporters, showed a group of around 10 neo-Nazis marching surrounded by police officers.

Dressed in black with a number carrying firearms and shields, the NSM marchers tore apart pride flags and pushed over at least one counter-demonstrator. One even appeared to urinate on an Israeli flag.

See? They were supported by the local police, so you know it was an entirely trouble-free and socially acceptable intervention. They didn’t mean any harm, as a few quotes from the NSM show.

[The National Socialist Movement] NSM will be armed and counter-protesting the freaks, wrote Burt Colucci, the self-identified “commander” of the neo-Nazi NSM, on Russian social network VK.

NSM, lets put some boots on the ground!! I don’t really give a damn about op-sec or Antifa in this situation. We go in with Swastikas blazing and if people don’t like it, tough shit…

I might have been concerned and distressed, but no milkshakes were thrown. I repeat, there were no milkshakes. Thus was civility and order preserved.

A gathering of the broflakes

The Boston Straight Parade has faced a couple of major setbacks.

  • Tomi Lahren has endorsed it. That’s the kiss of death right there.
  • Their chosen “mascot”, Brad Pitt, has ordered them to stop using his name and image.
  • To fill the gaping void left by Pitt’s rejection, organizers asked Milo Yiannopoulos to fill in. Tomi Lahren pouts at the rejection.
  • Tragically and confusingly, desperate-for-attention Milo accepts.

    The organization later named Yiannopoulos, who is openly gay, as its grand marshal for the event.

    “I might technically be a sequined and perfectly coiffed friend of Dorothy’s, but I’ve spent my entire career advocating for the rights of America’s most brutally repressed identity — straight people — so I know a thing or two about discrimination,” Yiannopoulos said in a statement released by the group.

    “This parade is a gift to anyone, male or female, black or white—gay and transgender allies, too!—who will stand with us and celebrate the wonder and the majesty of God’s own heterosexuality. Men, bring your most toxic selves. Women, prepare to burn your briefcases! Because it’s great to be straight, and we’re not apologizing for it any more. We’re Here, Not Queer.”

  • The parade organizer, Mark Sahady, has been revealed to be a far right thug who has organized violent and anti-semitic events.

    David Neiwert, author of Alt America and a longtime observer of the US far right, believes the march is primarily opportunistic. For the Daily Kos, he described Sahady as a “street brawler” with “a history … of organizing violent events”.

    Neiwert told the Guardian: “What we know about these street-fighting gangs is that they latch on to whatever they can in order to go out and fight with the left.”

    He added: “In this case it’s so utterly juvenile that it’s like a sixth-grade taunt.”

There’s a word for these people.

Stop eating now!

Mexie spells out the complexities and contradictions of food. This is very distressing information! We’re mostly vegetarian here at Chez Myers — we’re not strict sticklers, it’s more a matter of avoiding meat in our daily diet — but even buying locally grown produce has its problems. One of the ways we’re undermining capitalism, at least, is that we avoid prepared foods even more. I’ve been getting hunks of raw vegetables and doing all the cooking myself.

If you watched the whole thing, you got the general message: you can stop exploiting animals right now as a step in the direction of the ultimate overthrow of capitalism, but we have a long way to go yet. Don’t give up just because we haven’t achieved perfection.

Jacob Wohl gets neatly eviscerated, probably doesn’t even know it

Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman are getting a lot of attention — I guess spectacular public pratfalls are a great way to get yourself a long profile in the Washington Post. Unfortunately for them, the profile is titled Meet the GOP operatives who aim to smear the 2020 Democrats — but keep bungling it. “Bungling” is the important word there.

There are many not so subtle digs, like the lead photo.

The expressions, the poses — this was not intended to flatter. Look at the length of Wohl’s tie, too. It’s not an important detail, but this is becoming a hallmark of the Trumpkin style.

Then there’s this description:

On Instagram, Wohl is prone to posting images of himself shirtless, staring into the camera with a come-hither look. He says he wants “what any other young man wants — fame and fortune.”

In his public appearances, he favors tightfitting suits and cultivates a serious demeanor. He swears by Garnier Fructis styling gel to shape his dark brown hair into a follicular architectural form with a gravity-defying ledge in the front.

I wonder if he even knows that he’s been dissed? Most of the article consists of our intrepid heroes claiming strong ties to various more infamous Republican operatives, followed by a paragraph in which a fact-checker called said Republicans to get frantic “I never knew these guys!” quotes. There are also summaries of their various failed exercises in rat-fucking.

Now the dilemma. If all publicity is good publicity, does this actually benefit the dopey duo?

That creepy, inelegant metric system

Once upon a time, I would have said this was satire, but satire is dead now. Tucker Carlson and the Wall Street Journal complain about the metric system in a tirade that belongs in The Onion.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson railed against the metric system of measurement in his show on Wednesday night, describing it as inelegant and creepy. James Panero, a cultural critic and executive editor of The New Criterion, joined Carlson for the segment.

Panero recently wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal attacking the metric system with its meters and kilograms and urging America to stick to its customary system of measurement, which resembles the old British Imperial system.

Almost every nation on Earth has fallen under the yoke of tyranny—the metric system, Carlson said. From Beijing to Buenos Aires, from Lusaka to London, the people of the world have been forced to measure their environment in millimeters and kilograms. The United States is the only major country that has resisted, but we have no reason to be ashamed for using feet and pounds.

Panero called the metric system the original system of global revolution and new world orders.

Carlson replied: God bless you, and that’s exactly what it is. Esperanto died, but the metric system continues, this weird, utopian, inelegant, creepy system that we alone have resisted.

What a strange perspective to have…that other countries have fallen under the yoke of tyranny—the metric system when, rather, it was adopted because a common system of measurement is a great benefit to trade.

As for being the system of global revolution, that’s just a nice bonus feature. Using the metric system doesn’t cause revolution, but but being able to communicate and share does foster international unity.

They make other looney claims.

His guest said America should stand strong against pressures to switch to the metric system, bringing it in line with much of the rest of the world, because customary measures such as feet, inches, miles, and pounds helped foster the Industrial Revolution and put men on the moon.

The Industrial Revolution was not a product of British Imperial measurements, it was just the system they were historically using while they went through that period. Don’t give me that bullshit about putting men on the moon with feet and pounds — the scientific community has universally accepted the metric system, including the US. Our recalcitrance is to our detriment, not our advantage, as for instance:

NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because a Lockheed Martin engineering team used English units of measurement while the agency’s team used the more conventional metric system for a key spacecraft operation

That Americans continue to use an antiquated, bizarre system of arbitrary units is a joke. Use metric for a while and it just makes more sense. I’m bilingual in metric and Imperial units, and it feels odd to have to switch to the archaic measures to communicate to American audiences. 30° is a warm summer day and 5mm is a small insect, dammit.

Carlson characterized the metric system is completely made up out of nothing.

They all are! You want to see some arbitrary argle bargle, read the history of imperial units.

Mile, any of various units of distance, such as the statute mile of 5,280 feet (1.609 km). It originated from the Roman mille passus, or “thousand paces,” which measured 5,000 Roman feet.

About the year 1500 the “old London” mile was defined as eight furlongs. At that time the furlong, measured by a larger northern (German) foot, was 625 feet, and thus the mile equaled 5,000 feet. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the mile gained an additional 280 feet—to 5,280—under a statute of 1593 that confirmed the use of a shorter foot that made the length of the furlong 660 feet.

Elsewhere in the British Isles, longer miles were used, including the Irish mile of 6,720 feet (2.048 km) and the Scottish mile of 5,952 English feet (1.814 km).

A nautical mile was originally defined as the length on the Earth’s surface of one minute (1/60 of a degree) of arc along a meridian (north-south line of longitude). Because of a slight flattening of the Earth in polar latitudes, however, the measurement of a nautical mile increases slightly toward the poles. For many years the British nautical mile, or admiralty mile, was set at 6,080 feet (1.85318 km), while the U.S. nautical mile was set at 6,080.20 feet (1.85324 km). In 1929 the nautical mile was redefined as exactly 1.852 km (about 6,076.11549 feet or 1.1508 statute miles) at an international conference held in Monaco, although the United States did not change over to the new international nautical mile until 1954.

Yeesh. Give me multiples of ten any time.

Don’t get me started on shoe and dress sizes, either.

A milkshake is a moderate, proportionate response

I’ve seen a lot of whining about how we shouldn’t throw milkshakes at fascists, and I can understand their reluctance. I’ll leave it to Greta Christina to explain why it’s necessary and reasonable.

You might think leftists need to stop painting conservatives as heartless bigots and stop painting the Republican Party as the Evil Empire. You might think punching Nazis or throwing milkshakes at fascists is unacceptable violence. You might think the word “fascist” is leftist hyperbole.

How bad do things have to get before you’ll change your mind?

Fascism typically turns the heat up a little at a time. “First they came for the socialists,” and all that. Each new horror is just a little bit worse than the last, normalizing the ones that came before it and numbing people to ones that are coming. It’s easy to see in retrospect that strong action should have been taken earlier — but when it’s happening, it’s easy to convince yourself that it isn’t really that bad. Especially if you’re not one of the main targets. Yet.

So how bad does it have to get? We already have concentration camps. We already have a sharp rise in violence against people of color, trans people, immigrants or people perceived to be immigrants. We already have an executive leader blatantly ignoring the Constitution and saying the law doesn’t apply to him. We already have the executive branch, the judiciary branch, and half the legislative branch corrupted and useless as a check on power. We already have serious rollbacks on women’s bodily autonomy. We already have white supremacist culture permeating police departments and widespread in the military. We already have historians who study fascism saying that yes, fascism is on the rise in the United States.

It doesn’t bode well for the future when people are aghast that we might respond to a betrayal of the rule of law or outright murder with hurled dairy products, but here we are, cowering in terror behind our so-called principles, afraid to trigger change for the better because there’s too much change for the worse going on.

Last week on Facebook I saw that Greta recommended this book, Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World, so I ordered it and read it. It’s good! The author is an organizer who has taught activists living under various fascist regimes how to resist, and it’s definitely not a handbook for terrorists. It explains how to undermine tyrants with little non-violent actions that diminish and weaken them — it’s also realistic about how difficult the process is, and how there are multiple potential points of failure. You won’t make any progress if you refuse to start, though, and over and over again, it emphasizes how important it is to find ways to laugh at the ruling regime.

Classic example demonstrating how online polls are worthless

We haven’t screwed with an online poll in a long time, but I think this one deserves a special bit of attention.

It’s from Arizona Wingnut Paul Gosar, DDS. It’s stupid because the wording is so flagrantly biased to the point where it shouldn’t even be a poll — if you feel that strongly about the issue, why are you asking for others’ opinions instead of standing up for your principles? I answered “no” to everything except the last one. I wonder if he gets enough votes that reject his biases, that he’ll then do an about-face?

I wasn’t even trying to be mindlessly contrary. I think “no” is the right answer to every question there but the last.

Boorish buffoon baffled by British boobtube!

Typically, when Americans arrive in a foreign country, they don’t rush to turn on the TV, do they? They’re in a new, interesting, stimulating place, and you’d think they’d be off seeing the sights and exploring the area. At least, that’s what I do.

Not our uncurious president, though. First thing he does on his trip to the UK is look for Fox News, and get distressed when he can’t find it.

Just arrived in the United Kingdom, Trump tweeted. The only problem is that @CNN is the primary source of news available from the U.S. After watching it for a short while, I turned it off. All negative & so much Fake News, very bad for U.S. Big ratings drop. Why doesn’t owner @ATT do something?

He’s in a privileged position of responsibility — he’s going to meet various political leaders and the queen, he’s got formal dinners to attend, and here he is, bitter that he can’t watch his idiot sycophants on Fox & Friends, and worse, is shouting it out on the internet to the world.

Old man, there’s a reason Fox News died in the UK: it’s the Republican Party Propaganda Channel. It’s a narrow niche, and people outside the USA and outside of your partisan worldview find it repellent and ugly. It would do you some good to acquire a different perspective, which is one of the benefits of travel. Unfortunately, you won’t get that perspective if you hide in your hotel room watching the TV and get all your meals from the local McDonalds.

It always sounds fancier in Latin

“Death of Spartacus,” drawn by H. Vogel. 19th-century illustration depicting the death of Spartacus, a gladiator who led a slave rebellion in Rome during the 1st century B.C.

Steve Bannon has always wallowed in the slime. He was in charge of that muckraking online tabloid, Breitbart. He was an advisor to Donald Trump. He was a co-founder of Cambridge Analytica, that data analysis firm that scraped the scum off the Facebook barrel to skew elections. He was an investment banker, the lowest of the low.

He seemed to have reached the bottom. He could go no lower. So to meet that challenge, he teamed up with the reactionary Catholics behind an organization called the Dignitatis Humanitas Institute — you can tell it’s a con by all the pretentious Latin. The motto is also a giveaway: Defending the Judaeo-Christian Foundations of Western Civilisation through the recognition that Man is made in the Image and Likeness of God. Bite me, Bannon.

This Judaeo-Christian nonsense is always a dead give-away that you’re dealing with frauds. They also have a Declaration that is full of arrogant pieties and annoyingly capitalized words. The deeper a guy is in the cesspit, the harder he strains to elevate himself by calling on God as his bestest buddy.

A. whereas the true nature of Man is that he is not an animal, but a human being made in the image and likeness of God, his creator,

B. whereas it is precisely the imago Dei that Man acknowledges within himself with such profound awe and respect to call human life sacred; and to which the moral sense testifies certain properties as being inalienable; indelible in every single human life from conception until natural death,

C. whereas these properties have come to be known in the modern, secular state as ‘fundamental human rights’,

D. whereas the most complete expression of human dignity is therefore to be found only in recognising Man’s true anthropological and existential nature, and that this recognition lies at the foundation of all that the world calls civilisation,

E. whereas in recognising Man’s rights as intrinsic to his being, and not the product of legal charters is essential to sustaining liberty in a free society, work done to promote such a view of human dignity thereby promotes the foundation of all human rights,

F. whereas it is impossible to deny the source of Man’s transcendent dignity, and at the same time maintain that such dignity exists, yet the school of humanism tried to do just this, and with its inevitable failure, Man has been left in the precarious state of having no inherent rights other than those which the social community deigns to confer on him,

G. whereas belief that the State is the source of our human rights might be called inauthentic human dignity,

H. whereas that which is most sacred about Man is beyond human description because it comes from God – image and likeness – who is himself ineffable, and that international charters can only leave Man diminished by the attempt to literalise the ineffable,

I. whereas these insights are needed to maintain the balance between the rights of the individual and the power of the State, and that therefore recognition of Man’s dignity affects society’s ability to organise itself in a virtuous way politically, so that this balance never crosses the tipping point,

J. whereas the proper relationship between the individual and the State is that the latter exists to serve the former, not vice versa,

K. whereas it is the recognition of the dignity of Man that is most lacking in our society, not rights, and that this imbalance must be redressed,

L. whereas the mutuality of the parallel concepts of human rights and human dignity, and their interdependence, is definitively institutionalised in the Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”,

Noble sentiments that rest entirely on the fiction of the Christian god. Too bad they’re paid for by a crude thug.

Anyway, Bannon was planning on buying up a medieval monastery in Italy — further attempts at desperately buying up some class, which he has always lacked — calling it a “gladiator school for culture warriors”. Oy, it sounds like Spartacus, only not the good movie by Stanley Kubrick, but the cheesy Starz series with oiled muscular bodies, naked slave girls, slow motion gore, and everyone yelling and making an “O” face. The whole thing reeks of over-compensation.

Alas, Bannon’s dream is not to be. Italy is evicting Steve Bannon. O Ignominy! The only thing left is for Bannon to strip, oil up, and fall upon his sword.